{"id":113104,"date":"2017-07-27T13:30:55","date_gmt":"2017-07-27T17:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=113104"},"modified":"2017-07-27T14:51:54","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T18:51:54","slug":"days-of-1966","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/27\/days-of-1966\/","title":{"rendered":"Excerpts from a Grumpy Russian Poet\u2019s Diary"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Igor Kholin. Illustrations by Ripley Whiteside.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Russian poet Igor Kholin died in 1999 an underappreciated talent, but his literary star is on the rise. His\u00a0<\/em>Selected Poems\u00a0were published in 1999\u00a0to wide acclaim, followed by his collected prose. This year, a new collection of his diaries and prose will be published in Russia. Ugly Duckling Presse released\u00a0<\/em>Kholin 1966: Diaries and Poems this past spring.\u00a0<\/em>We\u2019ve published an excerpt of these diary entries\u2014selected from his 1966 diaries and translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich\u2014below.<\/em>\u00a0\u2014Ed.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

August 17<\/strong><\/p>\n

I remember that as a kid I was particularly sensitive to verbal insults.<\/p>\n

I think that poems should adhere to three rules. They should be:<\/p>\n

1) Formally solid.<\/p>\n

2) Emotional.<\/p>\n

3) Intellectual.<\/p>\n

I came to these conclusions in part after reading a piece by Krishnamurti.<\/p>\n

Both my neighbors were utterly drunk. One of them dragged the other one home on a horse. They\u2019re both around 70.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

September 11<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not a soul in the house besides me and the cat.<\/p>\n

Yodkovsky Edmund Feliksovich. 33 years old. A towering hulk. A human chart. Overall a pretty decent person. However, his shortcomings exceed his positive qualities. My note about him will contain certain contradictions. Such is his nature.<\/p>\n

Positive quality\u2014he\u2019s kind. Negative\u2014inhumane. Positive\u2014he knows a lot. Negative\u2014he\u2019s incapable of making sense of phenomena. To be more precise\u2014he\u2019s not a thinking person. Messy. Eats for three. Clumsy. Bad dresser. Impossibly gross when it comes to women. I don\u2019t know how he gets away with it. But then again, that\u2019s the kind of woman he goes for. As they say: birds of a feather. I\u2019ve never seen Yodkovsky with a smart woman. Except for his first wife, Tamara Gromova. But she, too, had her limitations. Though in the end, it did dawn on her to leave him. Otherwise she\u2019d have been miserable her whole life. His second wife, Marina, is as dumb as a doorknob. When he married her he couldn\u2019t take his eyes off her. Then things cooled off. She got pregnant. She was right about to give birth and he left her. Just couldn\u2019t wait.<\/p>\n

We asked him, \u201cWhy\u2019d you leave her?\u201d<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cI thought she was somebody, but she turned out to be a nobody.\u201d<\/p>\n

You thought Marina was somebody? It\u2019s written all over her face: family and children come first!<\/p>\n

The second reason was the baby. Would we be wrong in calling Yodkovsky a moron and a sleaze?<\/p>\n

This Natalie of his is, to all appearances, a kind soul. But I feel sorry for her. Yodkovsky, the inveterate liar, is always conning her shamelessly. He promises a lot and never delivers. She\u2019s a pretty little female of the bourgeois species.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the weird thing. He\u2014Yodkovsky\u2014has spent his whole life striving to be honest and considers himself as such. But you\u2019d be hard-pressed to find a more inveterate liar. He lies, of course, to justify his ungentlemanly behavior. That\u2019s about all he\u2019s good for. Lazy. But he has a lot of potential. If he could only come up with a big project and make it happen. As long as it has nothing to do with literature. But he won\u2019t even try. He\u2019s just going to go on writing his poems. That\u2019s how these people are. They don\u2019t understand that not everyone is meant to be a poet.<\/p>\n

I was over at his place the other day. While I was there, he got packed and left for Adler. That\u2019s where his baby doll lives. I think he went to check and make sure she\u2019s not out whoring. There\u2019s another one of his traits. While he goes chasing after every skirt that swishes past.<\/p>\n

His mother has disowned him. She told me herself.<\/p>\n

Without a doubt, he\u2019s a despicable person. I don\u2019t care. It\u2019s his life.<\/p>\n

Yodkovsky is ingenuous. But his ingenuousness is covered in flies.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

September 14<\/strong><\/p>\n

What\u2019s more acceptable: a life filled with all kinds of stimulation, or a life of moderation.<\/p>\n

For a thinking person, it\u2019s the life of moderation. Leaves a lot of time for reflection.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s sunny, thank God. I ate. Going for a walk. Yesterday I wrote a poem, \u201cWater\u201d (for children). \u201cPigeons\u201d the day before yesterday. Today I\u2019m going to try to finish writing \u201cWarbling.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

September 21<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s horrifying how fast time flies. It\u2019s cold. No rain today. A strong wind. Walked around a lot, slept a lot. I\u2019ve been sleeping 12\u201314 hours a day. Maybe that\u2019s why time is galloping by so fast.<\/p>\n

September 19 I was in Moscow. Saw Sapgir. An insatiable traveler, he had barely gotten back from the south and was already taking off for Leningrad.<\/p>\n

Turns out he had gone down south with a woman he knows from Riga named Lida. I know this Lida. I was actually the one who first made her acquaintance, but Sapgir has kept it up all this time. Love. Kira sniffed them out somehow and now she\u2019s a raving Fury. So Sapgir took her to Leningrad. To absolve his guilt. He\u2019s gotten very fat, which really doesn\u2019t look good on him. The way he puts on weight is weird\u2014his face is spreading. He\u2019s still drinking a lot. But he still knows his limits. He was proclaiming some new ideas about poetry, but I don\u2019t remember anything.<\/p>\n

There were four of us: Tsyferov, Kira, Sapgir, and me. Plus Kira\u2019s parents\u2014her mom and dad. Naturally, it was mayhem. They made it completely impossible to pay attention. But he was saying interesting things. About the Leningrad poets Brodsky, Gorbovsky, and Rein, the last of which no one likes, neither in Moscow nor in Leningrad.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Kira Sapgir.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oct. 17. Monday<\/strong><\/p>\n

[The following entry is written in Yodkovsky\u2019s handwriting.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Kholin, Igor Sergeyevich. 47 years old. Tall, gaunt, stomach problems. A cultured man, lowborn. An autodidact (finished 2nd grade). The most brilliant incarnation of \u201cblack literature\u201d\u2014barracks poetry.<\/p>\n

I have a positive opinion of him, although people say all sorts of things about him: that he served in the NKVD, beat a prisoner half to death, and did time for it. If any of this is true, it\u2019s not his fault, it\u2019s the times. Positive qualities: a singular, severe worldview that manifests in both poetry and everyday life. For example: I went on for ages proving that Mayakovsky is \u201ca great bad poet,\u201d while he summed it up in a single epigram: \u201cMayakovsky is a great Chinese poet.\u201d And he\u2019s like that with everything.<\/p>\n

Negative qualities\u2014intellectually limited. It\u2019s that provincial narrow-mindedness that results from insufficient education. He\u2019s a bit like Tarsis: for him, communists and fascists were one and the same, and for Kholin, many things in life are \u201ctarred with the same brush\u201d\u2014he doesn\u2019t distinguish shades and nuances. Although, I repeat, in essence, he often turns out to be right because he sees the most drastic aspects of phenomena. Positive quality\u2014he\u2019s a moralist (in the lofty sense of the word); honorable in everyday situations.\u2028 Negative\u2014he\u2019s bilious. For him \u201cthe whole world\u2019s a brothel and all the people are whores.\u201d<\/p>\n

His personal needs are limited. Undemanding, practically ascetic.<\/p>\n

He has bad luck with women. He and his wife split up a long time ago, the best he can do now is mademoiselles like Eva Umanskaya.<\/p>\n

He recently endured the greatest passion of his life\u2014he fell in love with a model who, they say, dropped him for being penniless and impotent.<\/p>\n

A brighter spot was Anya Danziger, whom he treated like a daughter.<\/p>\n

Hardworking. Is knowledgeable about painting and contemporary leftist artists.<\/p>\n

I figure he\u2019ll remain an old bachelor.<\/p>\n

The best thing he\u2019s ever made is a handwritten book, The Work-Week on Earth<\/em>, about life in the barracks in Russia. He hasn\u2019t topped it yet\u2014he\u2019s hampered by a general lack of culture. I suspect that he reads little and unsystematically, and gets most of his information from hanging out with better-read friends.<\/p>\n

Kholin is a man with blinders on. The best lines he ever wrote\u2014In short, the poet doesn\u2019t fall far from the general secretary. And vice versa.<\/p>\n

I think that his literary fate is to remain a second-rate children\u2019s poet because he\u2019ll never have the courage to publish his adult poems abroad\u2014and anyway, no one would take them. Essentially, he\u2019s a representative of the homespun \u201cschool of bleakness.\u201d Rabin had the courage and the talent to make his name abroad, Kholin just doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

If he could only meet a nice girl like Natalie, he\u2019d be a lot happier. But he won\u2019t, and even if he did, she\u2019d walk right past him. He\u2019s old.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t care about what happens to him, but how can you help a man who, at 47, still makes horrifying spelling errors? Who conceitedly overestimates his capabilities? Who doesn\u2019t understand the essence of editing?<\/p>\n

Sometimes he\u2019s childishly trusting and open and happy to be alive. That\u2019s when I love him.<\/p>\n

If war breaks out, I want my commanding officer to be Igor Kholin.<\/p>\n

But his advice on writing is naive. Literature is not made by the semiliterate. Gorky also had a complex about being undereducated, but he managed to become the best-read man of his time. This is not going to happen for Kholin.<\/p>\n

Is Kholin kind? I don\u2019t know. But perhaps he will forgive this intrusion into his diary.<\/p>\n

[Note in the margins in Kholin\u2019s hand: \u201cThese several pages are the best thing that Yodkovsky has ever written\u201d\u2014I. Kholin, 11.4.66] <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

November 23<\/strong><\/p>\n

In addition to all his other failings, Brusilovsky lacks basic tact. Yesterday I was on the phone with Driz. He said he couldn\u2019t invite us over to his house. Something was going on with his wife. I think she\u2019s sick. Brusilovsky immediately came up with his own interpretation.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people are so greedy,\u201d he said, \u201cnot like you and me though, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t respond to that. He recently got a colossal studio. Two rooms, one larger, one smaller. Some lousy sculptor had it before Brusilovsky. He plastered all the walls with stucco to make it look like a grotto. It didn\u2019t work. Came out horribly tacky. I said as much to Tolya. Not sure he believed me. Whatever. He\u2019s the one who has to get by on his puny provincial intellect. At this point, I have no choice but to make a small digression. As a rule, I tend to pay closer attention to the negative traits of my friends and people who I come into contact with. For the most part, they\u2019re all good people. And, for the most part, they all have faults. In day-to-day life, I\u2019m pretty tolerant. And it\u2019s only here in my notes that I let it all out …<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Genrikh Sapgir.<\/p><\/div>\n

Not long ago\u2014November 20\u2014we all got really drunk on the occasion of my friend Genrikh Sapgir\u2019s birthday. There was Genrikh Sapgir, Kira Gurevich, Oskar Rabin and his wife Valya Kropivnitskaya, Yulia Anurova (Rasheeva), her nine-year-old daughter Katya, Tolya Brusilovsky, his wife Galya, Alyosha Khvostenko (an artist from Leningrad), Eva Umanskaya\u2014my former lover\u2014and Tanya Bolshakova from the Modeling Office, who was posing all night like a top model. They\u2019re all so identical. It\u2019s horrible. They all have the same gestures, smiles. It\u2019s a good thing I didn\u2019t marry Valentina Filippova, now Sergeeva in her second marriage. Tanya Bolshakova is just as pretty. But because of those smiles and gestures I found her repulsive. Tsyferov and his wife Natasha were there, too. Natasha is as sweet and pretty as ever. She\u2019s put on some weight since getting married, which really suits her. And she dropped those awful House of Fashion mannerisms. The menu: sandwiches with red caviar, ham, herbs, cheese and vegetable spread. There was also salad, grated turnip and red pepper. Roasted duck was the main attraction. The wine list included: pepper-infused vodka, regular vodka, and Gamza wine. It was an ordinary evening. Which is probably why I got drunk. I was the drunkest person there. Even drunker than Yulia Anurova. For the first time ever, Yulia didn\u2019t pull any stunts. Though she did get into a fight with her daughter. They riled each other up into some real hysterics. Yulia ran outside without a coat and lay down on a bench. I went out to talk her down. After that I became so drunk I don\u2019t remember anything else. I woke up in the morning in my room and turned on the light. Here is what appeared before me. A pool of vomit next to my bed. My suit and a lamp lying in it. My sheets were also covered in vomit. A cot against the far wall with Khvostenko sleeping in it. My head was coming apart like a badly glued box. I felt like I was on a swing set. I got up and cleaned up the vomit. But even afterward, there was a terrible stench in the room that lingered for a few more days. Khvostenko woke up, too. I woke up my landlady Lida Shevchuk. We all threw in for a fifth of vodka and six bottles of beer. Khvostenko and I went to the store. Sapgir and Yan Satunovsky came over. We drank everything we bought. I started feeling better. Khvostenko told me that when we got home the night before, I didn\u2019t go to bed; instead, we went to see this unbelievably sophisticated lady named Aelita. She didn\u2019t let us in. I tried to get him to go somewhere else, but he refused and we went back to my place. Lida told me that I had a talk with her about our relationship. I told her that she\u2019s a good person but that I wasn\u2019t going to sleep with her. Tolya Brusilovsky told me that I did a beautiful job setting up the cot for Khvostenko. I kept falling on it, getting up, and then falling again. And getting up again, et cetera.<\/p>\n

I have decided to sell the paintings I have.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been offered a place in a co-op in Vishnyaki, two rooms, 24 [square meters] total at 170 rubles\/square meter. They\u2019ve just started construction on the building. Should be completed in the first half of 1967. I have 1000 rubles. I need another 600. Where am I going to find it?<\/p>\n

I called up G. Sapgir today. He\u2019s going to a Schoenberg concert. My daughter came by. She got 50 r. out of me for a collar. She\u2019s having a coat made. We went to the bank together. I came home. Lida made noodles\u2014spaghetti. They\u2019ve started selling it now. They say we bought a whole product line from the Italians. Really good noodles. I\u2019m not liking the weather in Moscow right now: it\u2019s drizzling, dripping off the rooftops. 2\u20133 degrees Celsius. Khvostenko seems to have gone back to Leningrad. I didn\u2019t make an effort to get to know him. I have enough close friends to last me the rest of my life. I\u2019m not reading Balzac anymore. I\u2019m reading O. Henry. He has such tantalizingly precise plots. I like it. I wrote one grown-up poem today. Otherwise I\u2019m not writing anything right now. And I\u2019m even making an effort not to write.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

November 26<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fredynsky, first name Volodya. A tall citizen with narrow shoulders. Black beard. Going for the priest look. In reality, all of these external features are rooted in his wimpy little soul. That day\u2014and this was two or three days ago\u2014I was dragged over to his place by Gena Tsyferov. He was with a girl. She was unexceptional, a little Tatar. Tsyferov spent the whole night being neurotic. The little Tatar was hitting the bottle hard and felt like being kissed and hugged by everybody, not just Gena. The table was covered in comestibles. The satsivi<\/em> gleamed with a nutty sheen, the lobio<\/em> lay there modestly concealed, as if hiding from the guests. The quails, cut in two, basked on a great platter, surrounded by a ring dance of the greens known as purslane. The vodka glittered in cut-glass carafes, towering above the table: as if to say, Look at me, this is all good, but I am the empress here, and without me none of this\u2014the satsivi<\/em> and the lobio<\/em>, and the red pepper and the quails\u2014 will go down your throat. And indeed: we took her at her word and began demolishing her mercilessly, slamming back shot after shot, despite the fact that in her immediate vicinity, a bottle of Georgian champagne lay resting on ice. Everyone\u2019s tongue quickly loosened, but that did not make the conversation any more lively. Fredynsky was, as it were, the heart of the gathering: all eyes were on him. We drank to his health. Why? I don\u2019t know. It remained a mystery. When he was asked, he answered evasively: \u201cDoes it matter why we got together?\u201d Maybe he\u2019s right, who knows. He pontificated all night long: \u201cIlya Glazunov (a fashionable artist) came by the other day, he said my paintings are good.\u201d Then an immediate digression: \u201cEat the satsivi<\/em> first, then the lobio<\/em>!\u201d And again: \u201cIlya Glazunov said that when I have twenty paintings done, he\u2019ll get me a show at the Manezh.\u201d Basically, Ilya Glazunov came up about two hundred times. I remember that when Ilya Glazunov was still a total nobody, he used to drop Mikhalkov\u2019s name in exactly the same way\u00a0whenever he could: \u201cMy mentor Sergey Vladimirovich said this-and-that.\u201d The guests at Fredynsky\u2019s: Tsyferov, his beloved, some Ernest with his wife Katya. Yura\u2014Fredynsky\u2019s apprentice, also studies at the architecture institute\u2014a worthless character, his last name didn\u2019t stay with me. And two more colorless characters. Man and wife. She kept wetting her lips with her tongue to make them more sensitive. Seems like it was working. She was stocky, like a workhorse. I wonder what it would be like if you put high heels on a horse?<\/p>\n

Right now, the Moscow intelligentsia is very taken with this game: you light a match and pass it around a circle. Whoever\u2019s holding the match when it goes out has to answer any question asked by the other players. We played this game. The fundamental limitations of these people are evident from the kind of questions they were asking: How old are you? Who here don\u2019t you like? Who do you like best? To break up the monotony, I asked one guy: Do you masturbate? He answered that he did in his youth. And immediately became furious with me. I asked Fredynsky\u2019s beloved a question in an abstract language, something like, Aberdeh rukimeh eskeh tukimi cheloreh siliki? She didn\u2019t answer. Later I said that I was 33,000,145 years old, and they made me forfeit. In this game, you\u2019re also supposed to forfeit if you can\u2019t answer the question. Everyone went home late. We went out and hailed cabs. No one was that drunk. We didn\u2019t even sing. Tsyferov and his lover (can\u2019t remember her name, and I\u2019m too lazy to go look at the beginning of this entry) came over to my basement at Kirovskaya. I couldn\u2019t refuse him, and they spent the night at my place. I set up the cot for myself and went to bed. They sat down on the bed. Tsyferov started making the moves on her. I pretended to be asleep. She was resisting, fighting him off, but silently. I watched them through a slit in the blanket. He hitched up her skirt, and things got a little more interesting. Then they turned out the lights and I fell asleep. I woke up a couple of times, and they were still at it. They finally left around six in the morning. She never did give in. Now I remember, her name is Roza, she works in animation. I told Tsyferov that he should ask me ahead of time before he comes over again.<\/p>\n

Why do I keep a journal? Probably for practice. I don\u2019t break the entries up into paragraphs in order to save space. As soon as I started writing this entry, I mean the one for today, six or seven Leningraders showed up. Irena, back again from Leningrad with her husband, Rodek, Lelya with her conductor husband. Some guy named Mirkin, a composer, and another one. Lelya\u2019s husband (who everybody calls Yashka) came for a conductors\u2019 competition. I\u2019ll finish writing tomorrow. I\u2019m tired. The time is probably around two in the morning on November 28th.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Excerpted from\u00a0<\/em>Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems<\/a>\u00a0by Igor Kholin, translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich, and published by Ugly Duckling Presse this past\u00a0spring.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I remember that as a kid I was particularly sensitive to verbal insults. I think that poems should adhere to three rules. 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